This post first appeared at ProPublica, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power.
According to this year’s tax filing, the American Athletic Conference, the $150 million collegiate sports league that includes schools like Rice and Tulane, is striving to be a leader in inclusion, but no longer in diversity or equity.
UNICEF USA, which supports the United Nations’ humanitarian children’s mission, no longer wants a more equitable world for every child — just a better one.
And the National Association of Community Health Centers, whose tax filing once said it focused on medically underserved populations, is now “patient-centered for all.”
The changes reflect a broader retreat underway in the nonprofit world. After President Donald Trump ordered his administration to root out “illegal” diversity, equity and inclusion efforts earlier this year, opening the door to investigations and funding cuts for offenders, more than 1,000 charities rewrote their mission statements in forms they filed this year with the Internal Revenue Service, removing or minimizing language tied to race, inequity and historically disadvantaged communities, ProPublica found.
Some went further, scrubbing diversity initiatives from their websites along with commitments to building more inclusive institutions. They changed the job titles of leaders and, in some cases, even renamed themselves. An Ohio nonprofit once called the Financial Alliance for Racial Equity, for example, is now the Financial Alliance for Representation and Empowerment.
The organizations range from large nonprofits such as Seattle Children’s Hospital to smaller ones like a Minnesota-based nonprofit that promotes time with horses as a form of therapy. While many rely on government dollars — a sixth spent more than $750,000 in federal funding last year — about half of the charities that watered down their missions reported receiving no form of government funding.
“The administration’s attacks on DEI and equal opportunity efforts have created a chilling effect through fear, intimidation and confusion,” said Maya Raghu, who leads an initiative to protect DEI at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, which did not change its mission statement.
The Trump administration’s flurry of orders declared diversity programs “pernicious discrimination,” codifying an anti-DEI agenda long animated by claims that such programs disadvantage white men.
Raghu’s group has defended nonprofits from Trump’s crackdown, winning an injunction earlier this year against a Trump rule requiring government contractors to certify they did not have what it deemed unlawful DEI programs.
A separate effort by the National Urban League and the AIDS Foundation of Chicago brought a lawsuit against the Trump administration earlier this year, arguing that its executive orders were unconstitutional. The leader of one of the groups said that the administration’s actions were “based on a blatant and corrosive lie.” The group sought an injunction against the executive orders, but the effort was unsuccessful. The case is ongoing.
To identify organizations that removed DEI language from the mission statements in their tax filings, ProPublica developed its own list of about 20 DEI-related terms, including “disadvantaged” and “underrepresented.” About three quarters of the changes made to the mission statements explicitly removed at least one word on the list. The other organizations made more subtle edits to remove an emphasis on diversity and inclusion.
ProPublica reached out to hundreds of these nonprofits, big and small. Nearly all declined to discuss their changes in depth. Three organizations said they had already removed DEI language from their mission statements before Trump was elected for a second time, as part of routine strategic planning. Others, including the National Association of Community Health Centers, made distinctions between the mission statements they include in their 990 forms and their actual mission statements and said they remain committed to DEI.
“We want to be clear: NACHC’s mission to support Community Health Centers in serving medically underserved populations has not and – will not – change,” a spokesperson said in a statement. The group has used its new 990 language on its website for years but recently revised it, too. Now the group says on its website it wants to improve “health for all.”
Tom Fenstermaker, the director of communications for the American Athletic Conference, described the organization’s removal of references to diversity and equity as “simply a change in words” and emphasized the group’s commitment to “inclusive excellence.”
UNICEF USA did not respond to requests for comment.
The White House and the IRS also did not respond to requests for comment.
Adapt or DEI
For some organizations, the commitment to diversity appears to swing like a pendulum.
In the spring of 2020, as the murder of George Floyd by a white police officer spurred a racial reckoning, institutions across the public and private sectors scrambled to meet the public’s demand for action.
Scores of public companies promised lofty investments: Comcast pledged to invest $100 million to “fight injustice and inequality.” Facebook committed $200 million to Black-owned businesses and organizations.
Nonprofit tax records filed between 2019 and 2025 show a notable increase in references to many common DEI terms in mission statements filed after Floyd’s death. Those records also reflect a substantial increase in the number of leaders whose titles include some reference to DEI.
In October 2020, Teach for America, the $200 million nonprofit that places recent college graduates in schools serving low-income students, announced a new hire to lead its efforts centering DEI across the institution’s work. Longtime former CEO Elisa Villanueva Beard appointed Barbara Logan Smith as its newest head of diversity, equity and inclusiveness. The announcement described how “TFA is grounded in a commitment” to these values and linked to a page on the organization’s website that prominently displayed its pledge.
It wasn’t the charity’s first such commitment. The group adopted a diversity statement in 2007 and later created an Office of Diversity and Inclusiveness, but scrapped the department within the decade, according to news reports.
Since Trump took office earlier this year, the tides have turned again. Teach for America removed the DEI section from its website, cut out references to equity in the mission statement in its tax filings and changed Smith’s title to chief of experience and belonging.
Other nonprofits have made similar pivots. The National Council on Aging, which calls itself the first national voice for older adults and reported $100 million in revenue last year, revealed an ambitious plan in 2021 to address health disparities among aging Americans, aiming to assist those “that have been left behind for so many years [and] that have experienced so many disadvantages,” its president and chief executive officer, Ramsey Alwin, said at the time.
But in its latest tax filings, the organization eliminated references to “vulnerable” and “disadvantaged” communities in its mission statement; it has also removed the “Equity Promise” page on its website.
In a statement, a Teach for America spokesperson emphasized its commitment to cultivating educators in rural and urban areas, and ensuring that every child in the country has access to quality education.
“We have made changes to our language to make our commitment to all children clearer,” the statement read.
The National Council on Aging did not respond to a list of questions about its DEI efforts and the changes it made to its mission statement.
Even organizations that have long used DEI language to describe their work are changing their messaging. Galt Foundation, a staffing firm focused on expanding access to employment opportunities for people with disabilities, referenced diversity and inclusion in its tax filings for almost a decade until it removed the terms from its most recent disclosure.
Galt’s leader, Lisa Doyle, told ProPublica that removing references to diversity and inclusion on its tax filings was a business decision and that the group’s actual mission has not changed.
“We have a responsibility to adapt while staying true to our mission,” Doyle said in an interview. “So if we have to adapt our language to make sure that we’re able to continue to create that access, then that’s what we need to do.”
Trigger Warning
As the Trump administration deployed AI tools to identify and root out so-called woke ideology in government-funded programs, institutions across the country were forced to consider pragmatic changes to manage potential risk.
The administration has been aggressive in what it labels as DEI: A ProPublica review of grants terminated by the National Institutes of Health earlier this year found that projects swept up in the dragnet included those to curb stillbirths, child suicides and infant brain damage. Funding for some of those projects was reinstated following a lawsuit, but many remain canceled.
Institutions rushed to erase language that might trigger a reaction; their edit trails provide insight into the calculations on how far is too far when acknowledging inequality and advocating against it.
The changes to charity mission statements reveal common strategies that organizations appear to be using to reframe their work without DEI.
CodePath, AI4ALL and America On Tech did not respond to questions about why they made the edits.
Such changes haven’t helped at least one group evade notice.
Not long after Trump’s second inauguration, the Center for Workforce Inclusion, a nonprofit that helps older workers with job training and placement, changed the mission statement on its website to remove a commitment to “especially” helping low-income and disadvantaged adults.
By March, the group had gone a step further and changed its name to CWI Works.
Despite the edits, the White House still called CWI Works a “leftist, DEI-promoting” entity in May, when the administration proposed sweeping cuts to the Senior Community Service Employment Program, a critical source of funding for the group. CWI’s tax records, filed with the IRS later that month, listed its new name and mission.
The administration’s actions have had an acute impact on the organization’s work. In a LinkedIn post, the group’s president and CEO said CWI, like other grant recipients, was placed in the “truly awful” position of having to furlough tens of thousands of older job seekers and some of its own staff after the Trump administration froze funding for the SCSEP grant program.
Rita Santelli, a spokesperson for CWI, said the group is committed to ensuring that its programming is “accessible and effective for all older workers.”
Gene Takagi, a lawyer whose firm specializes in working with nonprofits, said there isn’t a single right answer on whether nonprofits should remove DEI language.
In a recent blog post, he suggested that organizations could mitigate risks of “unfair government intrusion” by removing references to DEI terms in public communications like 990s, but reaffirm their commitment to diversity and inclusion in direct messages to stakeholders and funders.
In an interview with ProPublica, Takagi compared the Trump administration’s actions to a bully drawing a line in the sand and acknowledged that things could get worse if organizations publicly retreat from their DEI values en masse.
“It’s not until somebody takes a step forward and says, ‘No, I don’t accept that,’ that things are going to change,” Takagi said.
Some charities have kept their missions intact, even in documents filed to the government.
BrightSpark Early Learning Services is a nonprofit in the Seattle area providing affordable child care services to families, many of whom are low-income. The organization’s curriculum has long been rooted in a racial equity lens, and its mission statement explicitly mentions its “anti-racist” approach to education. More than a quarter of the organization’s revenue came from federal grants last year.
YWCA USA, a social justice organization whose mission includes a commitment to “eliminating racism [and] empowering women,” has also stood behind its strong language. Several dozen of the local YWCA associations around the country have followed suit.
Neither BrightSpark nor YWCA USA agreed to speak with ProPublica, nor did any other charity that kept a commitment to DEI in their mission statements intact.
How We Reported This Story
ProPublica assembled a list of nonprofit organizations that have submitted electronic tax filings to the IRS in 2025. We used those filings to compare mission statements to those from the previous fiscal year. There are two places on the Form 990 where organizations are asked to describe their mission statement: in the “Summary” section in Part 1 and the “Statement of Program Service Accomplishments” in Part 3. Our analysis relied on the text included in Part 3, where organizations typically give the most expansive descriptions of their mission, but we checked the statements included in Part 1 to see if DEI commitments appeared there.
To assess whether organizations removed any language connected to diversity, equity and inclusion, we developed a list of keywords commonly associated with DEI and checked whether they had been removed. We did not distinguish between differences in punctuation. Then we used artificial intelligence to flag more subtle changes that did not include those keywords. The list of keywords included iterations of the words diversity, equity, inclusion, accessibility, racism, people of color, underserved, underrepresented, oppressed, disadvantaged, minority, BIPOC, indigenous, marginalized, gender, LGBT, discrimination and low-income. Sometimes an organization removed one of the keywords but still kept a clear commitment to diversity and inclusion in its mission statement. These organizations were removed from the final tally when reporters manually reviewed each organization’s two most recent mission statements.
